The Christmas Bride

‘No, you mustn’t do that,’ she said. A small icy finger of presentiment touched her spine, making her shiver. She could see the mix of derision and impatience in the look he was giving her, and although inwardly she felt humiliated by his obvious contempt, she still stood her ground.

‘What’s wrong now? Worried that you’re breaking some fearful taboo or something?’ he demanded sarcastically.

‘I don’t like the idea of you putting the ring on. It seems wrong, somehow,’ Tilly admitted.

‘Oh, I see. My putting my ring on your engagement finger when we aren’t engaged is wrong, but pretending that we are engaged when we aren’t is perfectly all right?’

‘It’s the symbolism of it,’ Tilly tried to explain. ‘There’s something about a man putting a ring on a woman’s finger…It might sound illogical to you—’

‘It does, and it is.’ Silas stopped her impatiently, taking hold of her hand again and slipping the ring onto her finger.

Tilly had told herself that it couldn’t possibly fit, but extraordinarily it did—and perfectly. So perfectly that it might have been made for her—or meant for her? What on earth had put that kind of foolish thought into her head?

‘There, it’s done.And nothing dramatic has happened.’

Not to him, maybe, Tilly acknowledged, but something had happened to her. The worn gold felt soft and heavy on her finger, and inside her chest her heart felt as constricted as though the ring had been slipped around it. When she looked down at her hand the diamonds flashed fire. Or was it the tears gathering in her own eyes that were responsible for the myriad rainbow display of colours she could see?

This wasn’t how a ring like this should be given and worn, and yet somehow just by wearing it she felt as though she had committed to something. Some message, some instinctive female awareness the ring was communicating to her. A sense of pain and foreboding filled her, but it was too late now. Silas’s ring was on her finger, and they were coming into Segovia, the lights from the town illuminating the interior of the car.

‘What was she like?’ Tilly asked softly, the question instinctive and unstoppable.

‘Who?’

‘Your mother.’

Silas wasn’t going to answer her, but somehow he heard himself saying quietly and truthfully, ‘She was a conservationist, wise and loving, and full of life. She died when I was eight. She was in a protest. Some violence broke out and my mother fell and hit her head. She died almost immediately.’

Tilly could feel the weight of the silence that followed his almost dispassionate words. Almost dispassionate, but not quite. She had sensed, even if she had not actually heard, the emotion behind them. She looked down at the ring and touched it gently, in tribute to the woman to whom it had belonged.

Silas had no idea why he had told Tilly about his mother. He rarely thought about her death these days. He was very fond of his stepmother, who had shown him understanding and kindness, and who had always respected his relationship with his father, and he certainly loved Joe. Damn all over-emotional, sentimental women. A wise man kept them out of his life, and didn’t make the mistake of getting involved with them in any way. There was only one reason he was here with Tilly now, and that was quite simply because she was providing him with the opportunity to get close to Art. And if that meant that he was using her, then he wasn’t going to feel guilty about that. She, after all, was equally guilty of using him.

‘I hadn’t expected the castle to be quite so remote,’Tilly admitted, nearly half an hour after they had driven through Segovia, with its picturesque buildings draped in pretty Christmas decorations. ‘Nor that it would be so high up in the mountains.’

They had already passed through the ski centres of Valdesqui and Navacerrada, looking as festive as a Christmas card, and although the snow-covered scenery outside the car was stunningly beautiful in the clearness of the early-evening moonlight, Tilly was surprised that her mother, who loved sunshine and heat, had chosen such a cold place for her wedding.

They turned off the main road onto a narrow track that wound up the steep mountainside, past fir trees thick with snow, towards the white-dusted, fairy-tale castle perched at its summit, lights shining welcomingly from its many tall, narrow windows. The castle was cleverly floodlit, heightening the impression that it had come straight out of a fairy story, and the surrounding snow was bathed in an almost iridescent pale pink glow

‘It’s beautiful,’ Tilly murmured appreciatively. Silas glanced at her, about to tell her cynically that it looked like something dreamed up by a Hollywood studio. But then he saw the way the moonlight filling the car illuminated her face, dusting her skin with silvery light and betraying her quickened breathing.

Extraordinarily and unbelievably his mind switched track, and suddenly he was asking himself if he held her under him and kissed her, with a man’s fierce need for a woman’s body, would that pulse in her throat jump and burn the way the pulse in her wrist had done when he had held her hand? And would that pulse then run like a cord to the stiffening peak of her breast when he circled the place where the smooth pale flesh gave way to the soft pink aureole? Would that too swell in erotic response to his touch, a moan of pleasure suppressed deep in her throat causing her pulse to jump higher, while he rolled her nipple between his thumb and forefinger, savouring each further intimacy, knowing what her small restless movement meant? Knowing, too, that she would be wet and hungry for him—

Abruptly Silas blocked off his thoughts. It startled him to discover just how far and how fast they had travelled on their own erotic journey without his permission. He wasn’t given to fantasising about sex with a woman he was in a relationship with, never mind one who was virtually a complete stranger to him. He didn’t need to fantasise about sex, since it was always on offer to him should he want it. But, just as he was revolted by the thought of eating junk food, so, equally, he was turned off by the idea of indulging in junk sex. Which was probably why he was feeling like this now, with an erection so hard and swollen that it actually felt painful. He had been so busy working these last few months that he hadn’t had time to get involved in a relationship. The ex with whom he occasionally had mutually enjoyable release sex had decided to get married, and he couldn’t really remember the last time he had spent so much time in close proximity to a woman in a non-sexual way. And that, no doubt, was why his body was reacting like a hormone junkie who had the promise of a massive fix.

Their driver turned the four-wheel drive into the inner courtyard of the castle, coming to a stop outside the impressive iron-studded wooden doors.

Tilly smiled at the driver as he held open her door for her and helped her out. The courtyard had been cleared of snow, but she could still smell it on the early-evening air, and there was a shine on the courtyard floor that warned her the stones underfoot would be icy.

The huge double doors had been flung open, and Tilly goggled to see two fully liveried footmen stepping outside. Liveried footmen! She was so taken aback she forgot to watch where she was walking, and gasped with shock as she stepped onto a patch of ice and started to lose her balance.

Hard, sure hands gripped her arms, dragging her back against the safety of an equally hard male body.

And there she stood, her back pressed tightly into Silas’s body, his arms wrapped securely around her, as her mother and the man Tilly presumed must be her mother’s new fiancé stood in the open doorway, watching them. Her reaction was instinctive and disastrous. She turned her head to look at Silas, intending to demand that he release her, but when she realised how close she was to his mouth all she could do was look at it instead, while the hot pulse of lust inside her became a positive volcano of female desire. She lifted her hand—surely not because she had actually intended to touch him, to trace the outline of that firmly shaped male mouth with its sensually full bottom lip? Surely she had not actually intended to do that? No, of course not. She simply wasn’t that kind of woman. How could she be when she had spent the better part of her young adult life training herself not to be? All she had wanted to do was to push her hair back off her face. And that was what she would have done too, if Silas hadn’t caught hold of her hand.

The hand on which she was wearing his mother’s ring. A hard knot of emotions filled her chest cavity and blocked her throat. An overwhelming sense of sadness and love and hope.

‘Silas…’ Her lips framed his name and her eyes filled with soft warm tears.

What the hell was a going on? Silas wondered in disbelief. One minute he was reacting instinctively to save an idiotic female from falling over; the next he was holding her in his arms and getting an emotional message he couldn’t block, feeling as if he was experiencing something of such importance that it could be the pivot on which the whole of his future life would turn.

He watched as Tilly’s lips framed his name, and felt the aching drag of his own sexual need to bend his head to hers and to explore the shape and texture of her mouth. Not just once, but over and over again, until it was imprinted on his senses for ever. So that he could recall its memory within a heartbeat. So that he could hold it to him for always.

Silas tensed as he heard the sharp ring of an inner warning bell.

This was not a direction in which he wanted to go. This kind of emotional intensity, this kind of emotional dependency, was not for him. And certainly not with a woman like this. Tilly had lied to him once already. He did not for one moment believe the sob story of concerned and loving daughter she had used when describing her mother’s marriage history. Logic told him that there had to be some darker and far more selfish reason for what she was doing. As yet he hadn’t unearthed it—but then he hadn’t tried very hard, had he? After all, he had his own secret agenda. He might not have discovered her hidden motive, but that didn’t mean it didn’t exist. For now he was content to play along with her game, and the role she had cast for him, because it suited his own purposes. But this looking at her mouth and feeling that he’d stepped into another dimension where emotion and instinct held sway rather than hardheaded logic and knowledge had to be parcelled up and locked away somewhere.

In the few seconds it had taken for him to catalogue his uncharacteristic reaction, Tilly’s face had started to glow a soft pink.

‘Darling…’

Abruptly Tilly wrenched her unwilling gaze from Silas’s mouth to focus on her mother.

Physically, Annabelle Lucas looked very much like her daughter, although where Tilly downplayed her femininity, Annabelle cosseted and projected hers. Slightly shorter than Tilly, she had the same hourglass figure, and the same honey and butter-coloured hair. However, where Tilly rarely wore make-up, other than a hint of eyeshadow and mascara and a slick of lipgloss, Annabelle delighted in ‘prettifying’ herself, as she called it. Tilly favoured understated businesslike suits, and casual clothes when she wasn’t working; Annabelle dressed in floaty, feminine creations.

Tilly tried to wriggle out of Silas’s grip, but instead of letting her go he bent his mouth to her ear and warned, ‘We’re supposed to be a deliriously loved-up, newly engaged couple, remember?’

Tilly tried to ignore the effect the warmth of his breath against her ear was having on her.

‘We don’t have to put on an act for my mother,’ she protested. But she knew her argument was as weak as her trembling knees.

The arch look her mother gave them as she hurried over to them in a cloud of her favourite perfume made Tilly want to grit her teeth, but there was nothing she could say or do—not with her mother’s new fiancé within earshot.

‘Art, come and say hello to my wonderful daughter, Tilly, and her gorgeous fiancé.’

Her mother was kissing Silas with rather too much enthusiasm, Tilly decided sourly.

‘How sweet, Tilly, that you can’t bear to let go of him.’

Tilly heard her mother laughing. Red-faced, she tried to snatch her hand back from Silas’s arm, but for some reason he covered it with his own, refusing to let her go.

‘Silas Stanway,’ Silas introduced himself, extending his hand to Art, but still, Tilly noticed dizzily, managing to keep her tucked up against him. She could have used more force to pull away, but slipping on the ice and ending up on her bottom was hardly the best way to make a good impression in front of her stepfather-to-be, she decided.

Her mother really must have been wearing rose-tinted glosses when she had fallen in love with Art, Tilly acknowledged, relieved to have her hand shaken rather than having to submit to a kiss. Fittingly for such a fairy-tale-looking castle, he did actually look remarkably toad-like, with his square build and jowly face. Even his unblinking stare had something unnervingly toadish about it.

He was obviously a man of few words, and, perhaps because of this, her mother seemed to have gone in to verbal overdrive, behaving like an over-animated actress, clapping her hands, widening her eyes and exclaiming theatrically, ‘This is all so perfect! My darling Art is like a magician, making everything so wonderful for me—and all the more wonderful now that you’re here, Tilly.’ Tears filled her eyes, somehow managing not to spill over and spoil her make-up. ‘I’m just so very happy. I’ve always wanted to be part of a big happy family. Do you remember, darling, how you used to tell me that all you wanted for Christmas was a big sister? So sweet. And now here I am, getting not just the most perfect husband but two gorgeous new daughters and their adorable children.’

If only her father were here to witness this, and to share this moment of almost black humour with her, Tilly thought wryly, as she wondered how her mother had managed to mentally banish the various sets of step-families she had collected via her previous marriages.